White House Tally Appears to Overstate Stimulus Jobs

The number of jobs the Obama administration credits to federal stimulus money could be overstated by at least 20,000 of the 640,000 claimed, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.

Recipients of the government grants and contracts appear to have made mistakes when estimating the number of jobs that have been saved or created, according to the Journal's review. Some recipients said they were confused by forms that asked how they spent the money.

ENLARGE

Head Start teacher Juan Garcia guides children this summer in a pre-kindergarten program in Tampa, Fla.
St. Petersburg Times/Zuma Press

The Obama administration said Friday that spending from the $787 billion stimulus program had directly created or saved about 640,000 jobs through Sept. 30. Republicans challenged the claim, saying there was no concrete way to tally jobs "saved." Less than half the stimulus money has been spent so far.

Ed DeSeve, the senior adviser to President Barack Obama on implementation of the stimulus plan, said Tuesday in a statement responding to questions from the Journal that the administration knew the reports were not "100 percent accurate" but that the plan was supposed "to create jobs, not count them." He said that even the "approximate" total pointed to "tremendous progress."

"We are looking at both overcount reports and undercount reports, and continue to ask questions of recipients to try to fix errors," Mr. DeSeve said. "In the end, we think any adjustments to the direct jobs count will be modest as a percentage of the 640,000 jobs total, either raising it or lowering it slightly."

The U.S. education, housing, and health and human services departments said they were working to correct the data.

Some Head Start preschool programs reported that stimulus money saved the job of every staff member who received a cost-of-living pay raise, according to their filings. Some colleges and universities counted every part-time student work-study position as a full-time job, according to their reports, which are published online at recovery.gov.

And some low-income housing landlords whose decades-old contracts with the federal government were funded by the stimulus this year reported a total of 6,463 employees as having jobs linked to the stimulus package.

Most recipients of stimulus money are required to file quarterly reports on how they used it. The government published more than 150,000 such reports late last week. A preliminary review revealed dozens of recipients claiming to have created or saved at least one job with less than $2,000 in stimulus money, to a total of at least 3,300 jobs.

A Kentucky shoe-store owner claimed to have created or saved nine jobs with an $889.60 contract to supply work boots to the Army Corps of Engineers. The owner said he supplied nine pairs of boots and that the mistake arose from confusion over the government form.

In addition, as many as 86% of the jobs estimated by recipients of Head Start grants could have been inaccurately reported, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. The department said 277 of the 1,601 reports it had received were being reviewed after being contacted by the Journal. Those reports claimed 7,753 jobs created or saved out of a total of 8,997 reported.

"Holy moly, that's not right," Teresa Cox, executive director of the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency in Salem, Ore., said of her organization's report. It indicated that 205 jobs were created or saved with the agency's $397,761 federal grant. The money, she said, was used for pay raises.

Ms. Cox said her agency thought it was supposed to report the number of employees affected by the stimulus money. "And the only way to do that was to create new jobs or retain jobs."

An HHS spokesman, Luis Rosero, said the department had told recipients to report only fractions of a job if the money was being used for bonuses or raises.

Stetson University in DeLand, Fla., counted every part-time work-study position funded by the stimulus, and, in some cases, more than one work-study position held by the same student. That led to the university reporting that it had created or saved 483 jobs with a $193,469 grant for its work-study program.

University spokeswoman Cindi Brownfield said the campus has since realized that the actual jobs number should have been written as the full-time equivalent of the jobs -- probably between 18 and 30.

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